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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Hard Disk Activity, And Tiger Upgrade

runkyfunky - May 31, 2005 - 11:33 am

I've got a 12" PowerBook, 867Mhz, 1.12GB RAM, 40GB HD, combo DVD drive.

While still running 10.3 I tried to run the CRON scripts in the terminal window since my Powerbook does not stay away overnight. This was the first time I ever attemted to do that, and I'm NOT a Unix geek. I saw a comment about it somewhere online, and found the CRON commands (daily, weekly, monthly) and opened the terminal window, and ran all three. Sorry, but I didn't think to note where I saw the comment, nor make a copy of Unix commands that I ran.

Anyway, after doing that, my machine began to act strange. apps got slower, burning DVDs (to a LaCie DVD burner) was always getting hung, or creating unreadable DVDs, and certain apps were crapping out. Also, the Activity Monitor would no longer work. Wouldn't even launch...

So I purchased an external HD (LaCie Porche model, 180GB, firewire) and backed up all of my work files, and the apps folder, then installed Tiger, hoping that would would simply fix the problem. I did a replacement install, so there was an "previous System" folder left on the HD. I did not zero out the HD.

Now the system seems to run slow, the apps are still slogging too, the hard disk seems to constantly spin up and stay active, and when I'm online I notice that trying to type emails in Yahoo is incredibly slow as well. The cursor is a sentence or two behind my typing!

I love my Macs (been working on them since 1990) but I'm not geeky enough to get what's going on and how to fix it...

HELP.

Del Shimandle

Mikuro - May 31, 2005 - 4:07 pm

Hi Del,

I'm not sure about the Panther problems, although it seems unlikely that they could be caused by Cron scripts. But I don't really have enough info on that to say. In the future, though, you might want to use some third-party programs like Cocktail (http://www.macosxcocktail.com/) to run these scripts for you.

As for the Tiger problem (which for now I assume is unrelated), my guess is that it's caused by Spotlight. When you first install Tiger, Spotlight needs to index your entire volume. This is a one-time process that can take several hours, and can be very disk-intensive. If what you're experiencing is Spotlight's normal behavior, just let it play it out and then everything should be fine.

However, Spotlight has been known to really bug out sometimes, such that it will never, EVER finish indexing, and that it will hog virtually all your CPU time. Sounds to me, from what you said about the typing being slow (!), that Spotlight's indexing has indeed gone crazy.

To better diagnose the problem, open Activity Monitor (located in "/Applications/Utilities/"). Activity Monitor will show you every running process and how much CPU time it's using. There are two processes you should keep an eye out for: "mdimport" and "update". If mdimport is using a lot of CPU time, chances are that it's just Spotlight's normal behavior. If Update is using all your CPU time, then something's probably gone wrong, and you'll need to "reset" Spotlight. (And if some other process is using a lot of CPU time, let me know, because that would probably mean the problem is completely unrelated to Spotlight and I'm on the wrong track here.)

To reset Spotlight, open System Preferences, click on Spotlight, and select the "Privacy" tab. Add your startup disk to the list of excluded folders, then close System Preferences, wait 5 minutes, and go back and remove it from the list. Spotlight should then begin indexing again, and hopefully it'll do so smoothly this time (I've not yet heard any reports of it going wrong twice in a row). Another simpler/scarier (you decide) way to accomplish this same task is to open Terminal and type "sudo mdutil -E /", and enter your administrator password at the prompt.

You might also want to use Terminal to see how big your Spotlight index is. Type these commands into Terminal:

cd /
sudo ls -l .Spotlight-V100/

Check the size of the "ContentIndex.db" file. It probably shouldn't be more than 100MB (mine in only 41MB). If it's significantly bigger than that, then you should reset Spotlight like I explained before.

Hope this helps,

-Matthew

runkyfunky - Jun 1, 2005 - 9:53 pm

Matthew,

Thanks for the response. I tried to check on the Spotlight size the way you described, but Terminal was saying it didn't exist...

I scrapped the whole thing, purchased an external drive, backed up my work files, then did a clean install of Tiger. That seemed to make the difference. No constant HD spin, etc. Today I installed all of my apps again (Adobe CS, MSOffice, Dreamweaver, etc.) When I got to install Quark, it said I needed to have Classic installed since it was an upgrade CD. Apparently Tiger does not install Classic! That really surprises me...

Anyway, I looked for a Classic installer on the Tiger DVD. None. The "Help" menu was not very helpful, but seemed to indicate I should install OS9.2 from my original CD. So I tried that. It crapped out though, and wouldn't complete, though there is now a Classic button in my System Preferences control panel.

I finally managed to get Quark installed by plugging in my 4.0 serial number instead of the 6.5.

However, now the Activity Monitor is not responding again!!! Even after a reboot.

AAARGHHH.

Any clues? Am I gonna have to start over, again?
Is there a way I can delete whatever part of OS9 got installed? Remove the Classic icon from System Prefs panel?

Help.

Thanks,
Del (delshimandle at yahoo dot com)